Toni Morrison
Knopf
145 pages
Chicago Tribune
27 May 2012
When he gets the chance, Frank Money, the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 10th novel, Home, sprints out of his dead-end hometown, Lotus, Ga. Enlisting in the Army with his childhood friends, Mike and Stuff, Money leaves Lotus searching for the world’s pleasures and war’s excitement.
145 pages
Chicago Tribune
27 May 2012
Readers first meet Money in Seattle, imitating a semi- coma and plotting his escape from a King County mental ward. A Korean War veteran, Money’s disquieting and carnage-heavy battle memories traumatize him. After his buddies become combat casualties, only Money’s belief in whiskey’s anxiolytic properties can “disperse ... the hovering dead he could no longer hear, talk to or laugh with.”
In Morrison’s earlier novels, the hovering dead join America’s spiritual past with its embodied present. En- folding this concept within novels that replicate it formally, beautifully, Morrison designs works that evoke musical composition. In Sula and Jazz Morrison develops a linguistic figure and plays its variations through story arcs and multiple character perspectives, and those variations evolve into the novel’s idiosyncratic form. In Home, “the hovering dead” not only haunt Money, it’s also his state of being. Morrison carries this through italicized sections between chapters that seem, at first, spoken by a secondary narrator, but the voice is actually Money’s. In these sections, Money often counterpoints the narrator: “You can keep writing, but I think you ought to know what’s true.”
Home has both an Odyssean lilt and a Sophoclean tinge. When Money receives a note explaining his younger sister’s condition — “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry” — he ends his short affair with Lily (his bewildered Seattle Circe) and reverses the Great Migration in order to save Ycidra “Cee” Money.
After Money enlists, Cee marries a boy named Principal, breaks out of Lotus and heads for Atlanta. Cee learns quickly that Prince, as he calls himself, only wants the car her Aunt Lenore loans them. Prince executes a swift U- turn. Determined to remain in Atlanta, Cee takes a job as a live-in assistant for a white surgeon, an experimental eugenicist. This is where Money finds Cee hollowed out and hovering.
Walton Muyumba
